But that had been before the interminable waste of the Grass War and the long train of young women and men in front of my desk with the trinkets they thought would give them a chance of not becoming food for crows in a field somewhere.

Blindness taught me to use my other senses and trust in portents, balancing the evidence of sound, touch, smell and taste against the ambiguous suggestions I sometimes received in dreams or in waking. The Sisters praised God for granting me self-sufficiency even as they forbade me to speak of my ‘visions’ to strangers. Needless to say, when the king’s sister arrived in person on a warm morning in the early summer of my twelfth year, demanding to see their blind charge and claiming we had met in a dream, the Sisters were mightily confused.

Emily M. Z. Carlyle currently lives in Germany. She is a professional historian, an avid reader, and an undercover writer. Her fiction has appeared in Doorknobs & BodyPaint, Fantastic Flash Fiction: An Anthology, Coyote Wild, Storyglossia, Mytholog, Ghoti Magazine, Reflection’s Edge, Thirteen, and the anthology Dead Men (and Women) Walking.